


The Lost and the Damned:

by TheLightdancer



Series: The War of the Jewels Against the Elder Queen of the Stars [4]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25062940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: The War of Wrath is over. Varda Elentari has been taken and her fortresses laid waste. In the midst of the upheaval and the futility, Eonwe stumbles on a being he had not seen in a very long time, she who would have been his wife in another world and another time.An interlude that grew out of a plot bunny that became a Night of the Lepus.
Series: The War of the Jewels Against the Elder Queen of the Stars [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1804138
Kudos: 6





	The Lost and the Damned:

THE RUINS OF BELERIAND:

It was over. It was all over. The Star-Queen's power, in the end, had failed as she had warned it would. She had planned, she said. Planned. Used Ilmare's body in a way more violating than any of her threats and her caresses, defiled her soul more fully than when she had torn her soul apart the first time. Ilmare had always been mightiest of the Maiar, and there were none of her kind like her left in the highest realm. The mightiest, drawn in wonder and splendor to the beauty of the Star-Queen, then hesitant. Then drawn at last when the stars began to sing. She had seen so much, been through so much.

Once she had been Hell-Queen, Lady of the Muspellir and now her domain was gone as if it had never been. All that suffering, back scarred, scarred down to the soul. All that arrogance. The duel with the hound that had overawed her with the dread power of the Doomsayer, and the blessed hope that the creature would have sent her Fea to Mandos. But it did not She had returned to the Star-Queen, bleeding from her throat. Weak, vulnerable. The Elentari had shown a twisted mockery of compassion and cauterized the wounds, and then punished her for seeking once again to escape her service. She did not want to die, or to escape at one level but she had.

Her Queen's words:

_**Even if the Dancer should humble me again, my stars shall ever burn and ever sing. And in you, O daughter-mine, I have made the greatest of all my legacies that ever were, or will ever be. I tore your soul to join ours. I did not need to grant you the pleasure I would have shown Manwe, not like that. Not to bind souls. We are daughter and mother, Erinti-dearest. The children I could have had with Manwenuz will never be. But you are, and have always been. The Hound tried to take my daughter from me but my wolf gave him his.** _

Her hand brushed the scarring on her throat as she moved silently, a glowing ghost whose light illuminated the reeking corpses around her with sadness. For this she had descended from Arda. Become a glowing monster, a duellist who had fought her own brother and Mairon and though her brother was greater than she in skill, her fires were a power he could not match, would never have matched.

Eldar and Quendi lay together, Noldor, Teleri, Sindar, Vanyar. None of it meant anything, not here. They were all alike victims. The detritus of Feanor's folly and her mistress's desires to burn the world and to deny her kind even minor spheres.

Motion brushed near her, a swiftness that caused her to dim her glow in fear. The Dancer. Light, starlight, had been her Mistress's sphere and its burning power was something that had defeated Tulkas, whose power was struggle and fighting itself. And she had come, the dancer who was one with the fastest animals. Faster than light itself and with her husband's stunning power. Before her very eyes the Dancer had humbled her Queen, and for a moment she had rejoiced when all else failed. And then heard her mistress's song.

Further on she moved, the broken carcass of one of Varda's most terrible weapons, the things she had not mentioned to her, and that which had drained her enough that she had seen the necessity to......

Its golden corpse had shattered wings, two of the heads shorn clear off, and the birds of Yavanna were at their work picking and feasting on the carcass. The Star-Dragons had been a desperate gamble, a thing of madness and mockery of Melkor's greatest weapons. And each of the four beasts had single-handedly nearly won the war for wall that, only Melkor himself arriving in the fullness of his splendor and Mairon by his side, coming in a form like and yet unlike Yavanna's great reptiles and breathing a flame of his own had seen that war ultimately turn round again.

For a moment she paused, the Dancer's appearance moving onward, and in sorrow she knelt by the carcass of the thing. Anacalagon had been the steed of Melkor and Mairon and he had laid waste this one, she knew the marks of his teeth and his claws.

 _ **I'm sorry,** _she murmured to the corpse. _**None of you deserved this. And......I helped to make it be.** _

Against the rotting corpse of a star-dragon she wept tears of fire, everything weighing into her. The power that roiled within her, that had warped and mutated her as thoroughly as any of the Eldar she'd uncovered the secret to make, was quiescent. A small mercy. Maybe, just maybe, she could go to the Mahanaxanar. Let them disembody her and put her beyond the Doors. It would be defiance, a hopeless one, but all the same Varda's designs would have failed and she co-

_Ilmare? Is that you?_

She froze. Him. The herald of Manwe Sulimo, he who had chosen her long ago and she him. He had suffered from her leaving him as his master had from her mistress, first her fall, then her taking him to spouse and trying to tempt him. The swordsman she'd triumphed over in a deeper and more painful suffering than ever she could have imagined.

Eonwe, she murmured. He was splendid, golden-haired, shining with the soul-fires of Aman.

Allfather's beard, _Ilmare, what has happened to you?_ His cry was one of dismay and she looked down. Oh. Right. The wounds at her throat. The burns on parts of her body from it. From the Change. From....

Maiar Fana in this sense did not truly know illness, he had thought, yet the sight of the fearsome Hell-Queen prostrate and vomiting before him next to the broken body of her Queen's monster was something that troubled him.

She looked at him. Her light had changed. Changed. Warped. Altered. Become more intense, with that kind of heaviness weighing things down around her that her Mistress had shown. She looked desperate, haggard, and yet that sight that was as his Master's perceived something powerful, dangerous. A coiled star-dragon with eight, not three, heads slumbering.

_**I........I can't keep doing this, Eonwe. I have been a monster too long. I repent. I have Fallen, I have failed. I took such pride in such wasted things and look at me. I.......I want to atone for....** _

Melian had told him on her return that Ilmare had had a chance to take her captive to her mistress, the Star-Queen's direct orders, and that she had let her flee. It was with him that she had come, now that the war was over. And it was her, clad not in the Elf-form she had worn but, for a time, as a star-spirit akin to that of the former Hell-Queen who stepped around to them next.

She too saw what he did, and her reaction was distinct. He loved Ilmare still, and that part of him loved deeply. and love could be blind. Melian, who owed her her life, saw with the eyes of a deeper sight. Something awful had happened, and had been done to her. The transformation of the colossus that had fallen upon fledging Arda into the glowing being of fire who had fallen, in the end, to Nessa and been chained now made a deeper sense. The Star-Dragons alone wouldn't have done it. This?

What has she done to you?

_**I'm tired, Melian. I'm so very tired. I have been a brother to dragons and a companion to owls. My skin is charred upon me and my bones are burned with heat.** _

And with that she slumped on the ground before them, just barely missing the pool of her own vomit.

 _I_........Melian was silent. _She is hurt. Badly so. She said she repented. Should we risk this?_

_The Mahanxanar? I do not doubt that if they allowed Varda the one chance that they would allow it for the Hell-Queen, too._

With that the two Maiar bent down and picked her up, taking her carefully, Eonwe's wings beating and Melian letting herself experience the joy of moving as a string of starlight, holy starlight.

They brought her to an encampment, where she remained, still and silent.

Motion, that surpassing speed and sense of Existence that was Nessa's presence. Too fast for them, the distortion in reality that marked her arrival shimmered as she seemed to appear out of nowhere.

She paused.

_The Hell-Queen, you found her._

She stepped over to her or seemed to simply lunge, no eyes were quick enough beyond her own to tell, then knelt beside her. With a slowness by her standards and a swiftness by others, her hands moved.

 _Her soul...._ she gasped. _The Star-Kindler did something to-_

She looked at Melian. _Perhaps you were right. There is something here. Nothing, save the Star-Kinder, was truly evil in the beginning. Maybe there is enough of that goodn-_

Ilmare's eyes opened and the first thing she saw was the hand of the Dancer at her throat, and her face went pale and she seemed to curl upon herself. Feeling that pulse of fear and why, Nessa moved her hand away.

And it was then that he came, like a storm-cloud, among them.

The Great King, but clad not in that awesome form that had won the war. He was shielding the world, giving it diffusion from the star-song. The Fallen was behind the Doors but the Star-Song had not changed, and it seemed never might it have done so. Before him bowed all save the curled on herself form of the Hell-Queen, and Melkor King of Kings stopped cold, a look of sorrow and compassion crossing his face.

He too knelt beside her.

**What marvels my sister wrought. To take she who would have been closest to me in kind among the Maiar, and to make her....**

His voice was soft.

**Her chains on her are strong.**

He looked to Eonwe.

**What I can do to help her, shall be done. I make no promises, but I will not have it said that the Star-Kindler's song taunts us and that I sat on my throne and did nothing at all.**

Melkor placed his hand upon Ilmare's forehead and in that moment his own will blazed and forged anew, and in it a second power echoed, a terrible song that thrummed through Ilmare with a hellish gleam more powerful and dreadful than the Hell-Queen of the time of the War of the Powers. Then the thrumming stopped and she seemed to sleep in repose.

**If she makes it to the Mahanxanar, this will stand to her credit. She has endured more than anyone else of her Order could. Fitting, for in our Father's vision she was to you as I am to they.**

He sighed.

**I remained whole, in my Father's vision. Would that she had, too. Varda's stars are too beautiful to be left to the one Silmaril in the star-lanes and to you, Lady Melian, as the dim shadows of what they could have been.**

With that he departed, the thundercloud leaving.

Melian and Eonwe sat, near the seemingly slumbering Ilmare.

 _To think our kind could become this_ , murmured Melian softly.

 _I know_ , Eonwe sighed.

Ilmare opened her eyes. For a single blessed moment, one that would remain forever as a torment to the Queen of the World-Destroyers to come, it was the Ilmare of the dawn-times, she who had seen the colossus fall and been dragged with her along with the rest of the third and become weighed down with ever greater chains. Glowing, pure and briefly uncorrupted.

_**How?** _

_Melkor. The Great King himself healed you._

Ilmare looked at her hands in awe, and wept simple tears of joy.

With them she spent time in quiet words of physical and thought-speech, and yet in her words there was an arch power that the other Maiar, bound to obey a Vala, found themselves honing to in a way that could not be quite explained. Undertones and overtones, entire syllables that seemed to be overriden with another voclice.

She spoke, she wept, and a dream was heard, a good and simple dream. To be in Aman, repentant and a servant in truth as Varda had been in seeming, to hallow the darkened realm with the pure and wondrous light of the stars. No hunger of that which had animated the Hell-Queen. Gentleness, kindness, traces of the Maia both had known in the time of the Music and in the other, more wondrous things.

Finally, taking to herself a form clad in a simple blue dress evocative of Luthien Tinuviel (and that choice gave Melian sorrow and a sense of bittersweetness in seeing that her daughter had touched one of her enemies of old, thus) she began to stride with them further, heading to the camp of the Valar.

The main camp was four nights and three days' walk, a simple enough time had their Fana been more strictly of their thought but in the wake of the war's desolation and the pall it seemed...distasteful, not to see in full that ruin.

Two days and two nights had passed as the others, Ilmare looking in sorrow and regret upon things, when they had come to it. Past the Anfauglith, to what had been Tor Ni Muspelli.

She had paused then, and then a strangeness had come into her gaze and into her voice. A stillness and a stoicness that had seemed alien and horribly familiar at once. The expression so often on the face of the Star-Queen even in her madness, an expression akin to that of a daughter of flesh and soul, an impossibility fo-

That thought, that sudden and horrid emotion occurred to both of them and at last they grasped what had been done, what Ilmare must be struggling with.

She had fallen to her knees, the stoic mask shattered and wept, great wrenching sobs, and once more they moved on, sleeping just east of the shattered remnants of the old Rivers of Iron.

Starlight shone that night, an ill omen, and the thing that had kept Melian and Eonwe sleeping restfully. Ilmare had slept quietly then and then a blinding flash of light had hit them in Fana and Fea alike, and the next morning she was gone.

Gone, within an hour's arrival of the main camp of the Host of the West.

It would be said in later years, by those who knew only the Queen of the World-Destroyers, the Sinmara of the South and the Ilmare of the North, that she had never truly repented, or only feigned it. That it had been a last cruel torment of one who had loved her, and one who had hoped for her. In the secret writings among even the Maiar, this was held true.

One time, and one time only, would it be that Melian asked no less than the Doomsayer himself what the truth had been.

The Doomsayer had quoted a strange poem.

_So it holds true ever again and again in reality and rhyme,_

_love's ever new as the morning dew....but hate is as old as time._

\----------

To the far east, in the interior of what would become Eregion, strode a being who gleamed in a garment of brilliant silver, and her light was a thing of wonder that would draw to her servants of the old days, and others. She had become Varda's Daughter, empowered to match the lesser of the Aratar in raw strength and force, Tulkas the Valiant, Nessa who outdanced the very Starlight. Nienna the Weeper, Orome Monster-Slayer, and Vana Ever-Young. Empowered beyond any of the Maiar, blazing with the splendor of the stars, her song would seem fair and yet leave dissent and discord and desolation in its wake.

She had fled the pardon, in a sense. And in another sense, that which had germinated in her since the fall of Gondolin, that which was her reward, had come due.

She was given power, and she would use it to break and forge the world anew, and in the splendor of her new starlight and her new kingdom to outmatch that of the old and mad Star-Kindler, she would show the Lords of the West.

She would make the world beautiful, and do so in a way, too, greater than anything her mother could have wished.

The stars laughed that night, a laughter beautiful and cold and with a mad warble. And in the desolate transformation after the Wars of Beleriand, a new light began to glow and to sing music that was music of soul and of magic.


End file.
